Back on the job

My…as my kids referred to it as …"Peace Corps Winter Furlough 2006”…(T shirts for all)…didn’t start off so great…a 4 hour flight from Port of Spain Trinidad to Miami took 10 hours... but… in the final analysis it was the best ever vacation I ever had. Relaxing? Well not exactly…how do you relax when you have six klankinder jumping on top of each other in a pool…you spend the whole day counting heads, making sure there all on top of the water not under it. But, it was fun. Away for eight months and they all seem to be ten years older.

Now here it is the end of the first month of the New Year…where the heck did January go??? (wake up… It’s already the second week of Feb.) (Yes, I saw yesterdays Super Bowl…in Spanish)

The first week back I was back out on the “Red Road” heading for the interior. January is the last month of the short rainy season. Short doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of rain…. it means it only two months long… but it seems to me you get just as much rain in the short season as you do in the long (4 months) season. So here we were driving on the “Red Road” with the rain coming down so hard I was able to find familiar spots in the road…like…Lake Chaplain…Lake Tahoe…Lake Ontario…at one point Leo asked from the back seat “Bob how are you doing” …we all know what he meant…scared…”fine” I replied. I was thinking…this is a piece of cake…I could be driving over Donner Pass in a blizzard with the chains on the rear wheels of my front wheel drive Volvo…yes… I did that. Not counting family and friends…I do miss my skiing. The rain stopped…as it usually does after an hour or so… the sun came out and we reached our camp site along the river. A quick deep in the river…a diner of kip and rijst ( that makes 8 Dutch words… one more and it will be a word a month, now that’s progress) a short scotch and off to bed…under a mosquito net of course. The next morning we took a canoe to the Village of Banafookkondre (now you can see why I don’t learn Sranan Tongo) to teach the village farmers…the women… a new way of planting peanuts.

This is what this adventure is all about. Clearing a field…turning the soil…digging a drainage ditch…I came back to town dirty, happy and with a new product idea…”Jungle Butter”…peanut butter with a rain forest flavor…flavor to be discovered… where…in the jungle of course.

The last couple of weeks have been jammed packed with productive meetings. My “Family Chicken Coop” project has been enthusiastically endorsed by the IICA Techs I work with and the Village of Kaja Pada. This plus, no less then 5 other projects, are going to make for a busy year…I HOPE.